A Collaborative Framework for In-network Video Caching in Mobile Networks

Due to explosive growth of online video content in mobile wireless networks, in-network caching is becoming increasingly important to improve the end-user experience and reduce the Internet access cost for mobile network operators. However, caching is a difficult problem due to the very large number of online videos and video requests,limited capacity of caching nodes, and limited bandwidth of in-network links. Existing solutions that rely on static configurations and average request arrival rates are insufficient to handle dynamic request patterns effectively. In this paper, we propose a dynamic collaborative video caching framework to be deployed in mobile networks. We decompose the caching problem into a content placement subproblem and a source-selection subproblem. We then develop SRS (System capacity Reservation Strategy) to solve the content placement subproblem, and LinkShare, an adaptive traffic-aware algorithm to solve the source selection subproblem. Our framework supports congestion avoidance and allows merging multiple requests for the same video into one request. We carry extensive simulations to validate the proposed schemes. Simulation results show that our SRS algorithm achieves performance within 1-3% of the optimal values and LinkShare significantly outperforms existing solutions.